Cyanogen Demonstrates Quadrant’s Flaws

Quadrant has been a top-three benchmarking application of choice since the blow up of Google’s Android operating system. Other than the Linpack and Neocore benchmarking applications, Quadrant’s one of the only options. Quadrant is a piece of Android software developed by Aurora Softworks.

Today, famed Android developer Cyanogen posted a troubling tweet about the flaws of Aurora Softworks’ Quadrant application. He specifically pointed to the I/O portion of the Quadrant benchmark test. The I/O test is an assessment of the efficiency of “filesystem access and database operations” on a device. In Cyanogen’s tweet, he says he was able to exploit the flaw to get obscenely high Quadrant benchmark scores by mounting “a tmpfs over quadrant’s data directory.” A tmpfs, or temporary file storage system, can artificially inflate a device’s I/O score and provide unreal benchmark improvements.

We’ve seen this kind of artificially high score improvement most notably on the Samsung Galaxy S. The Galaxy S has been berated for it’s use of the RFS filesystem employed by Samsung which has caused stuttering and lag on Galaxy S devices. But hacks that mounted an Ext2, Ext3, or Ext4 partition to store application data boosted real world performance a sizable amount, but Quadrant scores through the roof.

Until Aurora Softworks can work out the bugs with it’s I/O test, Quadrant may not be the best source of speed confirmations. Cyanogen advised Android users: “Don’t rely on this stuff as your guide to how fast your phone is. There are a lot of other factors.”

Check out these ridiculous Quadrant scores below. One from Cyanogen and the other from one of our very own BriefMobile writers.